


The News of All the Nations

by athousandwinds



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-26
Updated: 2010-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-06 17:40:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athousandwinds/pseuds/athousandwinds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An English gentleman and an American boy from Hooverville oughtn't to have that much in common.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The News of All the Nations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sylviaandthe](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=sylviaandthe).



Usual day. Selling papes like a snotnosed kid still in shortpants, but it's work and a little bit of bread for himself. Frank's getting back into the life now, the quick-stepping past the women and the children to brush a man's sleeve. Doesn't matter how grubby, even now, men like to know what's going on in the world.

One man comes over to him; well-off, fair, clean-shaven. He buys the _Times_ and hands Frank too much money. He's gone before Frank can tell him so, though, and then Miss Blackwell calls out to him. Frank used to think she was secretary to some big guy in the city, but she's a real live medical doctor herself. Not even a nurse. She always takes the _Post_, though she got _Ladies' Home Journal_ once, too. For her sister, she said.

He uses the extra money to buy cold sausage for himself and potatoes for Laszlo and they cook 'em by the fire that night.

"Skinny English guy," he tells Laszlo. Laszlo looks kinda thoughtful then, but there's no way they'd miss the Doctor making another house call and he says so. Tallulah's of the same mind, next morning.

"He'd come and see us, right? I don't know where the heck he's from or whatever kind of thing he's in on, but if he was in New York he should come and see us."

Frank shrugs. "Maybe he wouldn't."

"Martha would," Tallulah says, like that settles it. Frank guesses she's kinda lonely in Manhattan. Stands to reason, not like she can talk to the other girls up there about Laszlo.

The Englishman comes again that morning, anyway, and this time he glances up at the sky.

"It's going to rain," he says. "You'd best get under cover before lunch or the papers will get wet."

It's August. It's sweltering and the only thing the papers are likely to get wet of is Frank's sweaty hands, but he nods and finds a shady spot a couple of minutes later. The clouds burst around one o'clock and Frank thinks about the English guy and how he was just a little creepy.

He looks at him properly the next morning. It's early and the streets are still drying out from last night, but the man looks fine and tidy, turned-out for Sundays like Frank's momma was always keen on. He's got big dark eyes that look queer in his pale face, but it's the type of queer that's almost pretty.

"You got a funny bone?" he asks. "Like an old war wound or something that tells you when it's going to come down?"

The Englishman smiles like he doesn't do it often enough, like no one ever tells him something happy. "I have a few old war wounds, but that's not it."

He pays Frank too much again and gets swallowed up in the crowd even before Frank opens his palm to check. Maybe it's an English thing, this vanishing without a trace. The Doctor and Martha did it like they never lived, which for all Frank knows, they didn't. They _said_ they weren't from around here and they knew things Frank didn't, even if that wasn't hard. Frank saw Solomon looking at them sometimes like he didn't know what to make of them either.

The next time he sees the man, it's outside the Empire State Building. He doesn't go up there much, no work for a guy with shabby boots and a Tennessee accent even if he wanted to look at that damn spike up close again. But he sees the sun on that yellow hair – and the guy has to be thirty-five, what the heck is he doing with hair still that colour? – and it makes him look twice.

"Hey," he says when he comes up to the man. Up here on Fifth Avenue, he looks natural, in the right place, except for the lost look. But Frank guesses he's had that a while, 'cause Solomon had the same expression sometimes when he was tired, all "why the hell am I still here?" Hell's the only word to use for some people. "I never did get your name."

It occurs to him the moment after he's said it that this is it, the guy in the suit and tie is going to walk away from the one in the hand-me-downs and say something smart about the manners of the lower classes to his friends. It makes him angry, God damn it, almost as angry as when some of the guys talked about Solomon behind his back.

But it doesn't happen. "Latimer," says the man, and holds his hand out to shake. "Timothy Latimer. And I don't know yours either."

"Frank."

Latimer nods, those eyes of his on Frank's face, taking everything in. "I think we have a friend in common."

Frank stops breathing.

Literally, just for a few seconds, but he feels like his shock is scribbled all over him. Maybe it must be, because Latimer reaches out, taps his shoulder awkwardly.

"I think we should go and get lunch."

"Uh," says Frank, not because he doesn't want to, but because there's no place in New York that'd serve both of them without funny looks like they were queers. Which, okay –

But Latimer seems to get it, because he buys sandwiches from a stall and they sit on the grass in Central Park. They talk about the Doctor, mostly, and Latimer takes out a silver fob watch and fingers it while he looks at Frank. It's not a nervous habit, quite, and Frank's not sure why it isn't. It looks maybe like Latimer does it for comfort, to remind himself that he's still there. Or maybe it's all baloney and Frank's making stuff up out of his own head again.

"What I liked about him is that I could trust him," Latimer says, rubbing the watch with the pad of his thumb. "I was still very much a child in some ways, I suppose, and there weren't many people whom I liked. He frightened me, too, much worse than my headmaster ever did. And yet..."

"Yeah," Frank says. He remembers the Doctor screaming at the Daleks, the furious devastation in the line of his shoulders and later, the warm smiles. He was talking to Martha when it happened, but – _"Kiss me later. You, too, Frank."_ He felt the terror rising in his throat and then it was gone, vanquished by the Doctor's grin. "He knew – things – about you, but he didn't care."

"No," Latimer murmurs. "No, he didn't."

Frank puts his hand out, touches the watch and Latimer's fingers with it. "Did he give you it?"

"Yes." But Latimer is looking at him, not the watch, and he clasps Frank's hand in the faintest squeeze before dropping it and smiling quietly.

The schoolteacher back in Tennessee called it making love. His pa called it rutting. Frank's mom called it go-call-your-pa-in-for-dinner-honey and nothing else, so he sort of arrived at the idea of girls by fits and starts. Men are queer, both ways you can mean it, because it's a darn stupid place to put it.

Except Latimer can do it okay, well enough that Frank kinda sees stars and moans and maybe whimpers a bit, but Latimer doesn't seem to mind. His breath on Frank's neck is hot and moist and sounds oddly shaky, but his hand on Frank's thigh is solid and _there_.

Frank stares up at the cracking paint on the ceiling when they're done and Latimer wiping the sweat from his eyes. It seems a strange way to spend a day. He loved Solomon maybe a bit and this kind of thing would have been idiotic, but not like they had the money for it anyway.

He recalls the name on Latimer's chequebook suddenly, and he presses down lightly on Latimer's side to get his attention. "Hey."

Latimer tilts his head and smiles. His eyes are heavy-lidded, so that it's impossible to tell what he's thinking now. "Yes?"

"You didn't say you were a major."

Latimer turns a little blanker and Frank feels suddenly bad. Solomon never liked talking about the war, either. Nobody did, except the angry ones who mostly raved about fighting for nothing and heroes' welcomes and all the rest of it. "Only by standing in dead men's shoes."

"Oh, yeah."

"Anyone can get from second lieutenant to major if they're careful." Latimer says it like a doctor, all cool and clinical. "I know a few who did, not that it did them any good. Being careful was useless in the war if your superiors didn't know about it. And if they did, they'd be liable to have you shot or disgraced. I never knew which was worse for them."

Frank looks at him as he says this, really looks at him, and Latimer's more sad than angry or disgusted. He guesses fifteen years' distance takes the edge off everything.

"You gonna go higher?" he asks, reaching out to stroke Latimer's hair. Latimer twitches away, then relaxes, pressing his head against the curve of Frank's palm.

"Yes," he says simply, like there's not even a question about it. Frank thinks maybe there isn't, with bad stuff like Italy and Abyssinia and all the rest of it happening. There's always gonna be another war.

They lie in silence for a while; his hand in Latimer's hair, Latimer rubbing slow circles on Frank's hip. Finally, at about four o'clock, Latimer stirs and lets out a deep breath.

"I was supposed to meet someone for lunch, too."

Frank grins at him sideways and gets up on his knees. "Guess you'll have to say sorry."

"He'll despise me forever more," Latimer observes, not sounding particularly upset. He shifts and sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Frank watches him grab his trousers, doing up his shirt as he goes. Five minutes and it's like the last few hours haven't even been. Latimer straightens the knot of his tie in the greenish mirror and hesitates, his hand going to his pocket.

Frank, still naked, thinks for a bad moment that Latimer's going to offer him money. He knows he'll probably hit him if he does. But Latimer only takes out the watch again and flicks it open.

"I did receive it from the Doctor," he says, coming back over to sit on the side of the bed. It's broken, Frank can see now, but it doesn't seem to matter. "I – it's the only thing that I have to remind me that it's all true."

"I guess they were kind of like ghosts," Frank says. They disappeared so quick, if he hadn't had Tallulah and Laszlo – and no Solomon – he would've thought he was waking up from a nightmare.

Latimer passes a hand over the nape of Frank's neck, smoothing, soothing, kind. "They weren't phantom-like to me. They were more real than anything." His fingers pause, rubbing a sure, definite circle into Frank's back. "They were the people who they have been in the past and they were the people they were when I met them and they were the people they will be in the future. It felt like – they inscribed themselves through time somehow, like they wrote their stories on the past. I suppose they must have done it in the future, too, but I don't know when."

He laughs, the first time Frank's ever heard it. It's a pretty nice laugh, sort of shy. "And you understand, all of that sounds completely mad. So I have the watch."

"I've got a couple of friends who were there," Frank tells him. "Even more than I was."

"They sound lovely," Latimer says, like he means it. He's just enough of a nice guy for Frank to think maybe he does. "I'd like to meet them some day."

Frank thinks of Latimer in Hooverville. He can't see it, or he can too well. The guys there have eyes that follow Tallulah, even though it's obvious the moment she gets close that she never saw a real diamond except in a store window. It's good that she's with Laszlo, those guys are scared of him. Someone like Latimer in a tailored suit or even in uniform would get beaten up before he got past the first tent.

"Maybe," he says.

Again, Latimer seems to get it, because he nods slowly. "I'm due to embark for England next Thursday," he says.

Frank leans forward and kisses him. It's kind of a shame, 'cause he likes Latimer, even the big dark eyes and the hair combed through with pomade. But it can't be helped and they've got until next Thursday.

"Hey," he says. "You said something about your matron."


End file.
